Now, let’s understand this basic concept – Jesus was not some sort of whiny wimp who refused to confront the establishment and took comfort in his own righteousness while leaving others to do the heavy lifting. Jesus made people angry, because that’s what happens when you defy bad people. Being a Christian does not mean that you have to shrug and let the likes of Hillary Clinton be elected so she and her minions can fire up her anti-faith pogrom against those of us who dare worship God and not the elite she represents. Maybe you didn’t notice, but they do not accept the concept that we have any legitimate interests or rights. They hate us. And, if we are weak and stupid enough to allow them to take power, they will act on their bigotry and prejudices. Baking cakes is only the start.

Resistance is not merely an option. It is a duty. And resistance to evil – because the desire to suppress our faith is evil – is not somehow unchristian because it can be aesthetically displeasing. Fighting back is not always pretty. Jesus cleared the temple of moneychangers. He made a mess and got people angry. He didn’t sit on the sidelines and write ponderous articles lambasting the people tossing over the tables because “We’re better than that.”

Wimp Jesus is not the real Jesus. Jesus wasn’t nice. Now, a friend of mine said to me the other day that while of course Jesus did some mean things, like calling people names or attacking them with a whip, we have to remember that He did it with perfect charity and knowledge, because He’s God and can know when it’s appropriate to do such things. This is true. However, the implication I got was this meant that we can’t know when it’s appropriate to do these things. Maybe my friend didn’t mean it quite like that but that’s what I got. Regardless, it’s also important to remember that everything Jesus did in the Bible is an example to us of what to do and how to act. If we were incapable of knowing when we could morally perform an action, then I don’t believe Jesus would have done it.

Your typical conservative, however, wants you to remember that we should be kind and accepting of freaks and deviants who want to ruin your lives and corrupt your children.

Though transgenderism is a far rarer phenomenon than homosexuality, I think most adults could admit it does seem like a rather persistent aspect of humanity. Most can probably recall a transgender person making at least some minor appearance in their life. If we concede that transgenderism is not going away, and is not something anyone intends to exert effort toward ending, then Americans, especially conservative ones, should reflect on our culture’s honest and fair attitude toward homosexuality and acknowledge that the most sensible path out of the present acrimony will probably require similar compromise.

Part one of the compromise will be borne by cultural conservatives and traditionalists. It asks for broad tolerance for the reality that transgender men and women exist, and are entitled to basic human dignity, just like everyone else. This does not mean having to morally endorse behavior many may believe runs contrary to God’s plan for a just and healthy society, but it does imply that acts like ostentatiously calling people by pronouns they don’t want, or belittling their personal struggle, are boorish and petty. It means acknowledging that arbitrary discrimination against transgender people is a cruel bigotry like any other.

It hurts gay and trannies’ feelings to tell them that they’re freaks and that you’re not going to kiss the ground on which they stand, so we can’t do that, oh, no. This is where niceness leads. This is where inaction leads.

“Good” people sit around and congratulate themselves on how they’re not going to do anything mean to anyone and remind everyone that these are just broken people who need to be shown love. Well, we have seen how effective this strategy is. We can argue certainly on which ways to fight back are moral or most useful but we have to realize that passively standing around and loving someone does not do anything. Because even the people who claim to be on our side are telling us to SHUT UP AND BAKE THE CAKE BIGOT.

President Trump announced on Wednesday that the United States will not “accept or allow” transgender people in the United States military, saying American forces “must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory” and could not afford to accommodate them.

Mr. Trump made the surprise declaration in a series of posts on Twitter, saying he had come to the decision after consulting with generals and military experts, whom he did not name.

“After consultation with my generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

Costs like paying for their gender reassignment surgery.

Now maybe the military can stop doing other stupid things like forcing soldiers to walk in high heels or letting women on the front lines.

Virginia native Danica Roem is running for a seat in her state’s House of Delegates. Should she emerge victorious from the June 13 Democratic primary, the 32-year-old would challenge longtime Republican incumbent Bob Marshall to represent Virginia’s 13th district and become the first openly transgender representative in the chamber.

A win in the general election would also make Roem the third openly transgender state legislator to ever hold office in the U.S., and one of only a few openly trans elected officials in the world.
***
Despite facing three other Democrats in the primary, Roem is optimistic. She has received several endorsements, including one from the Victory Fund, a national LGBTQ political organization.

“We are making 2017 the year of the trans candidate,” Victory Fund President Aisha C. Moodie-Mills said. “We have more transgender people running this cycle than almost all other cycles combined.”

Roem is one of at least 20 transgender candidates currently running for office across the U.S., according to the LGBTQ Representation and Rights Initiative.

Dear old Brianna is also running against several other Democrats. The party is so weak and degenerate that the crazies are coming out of the woodwork to eat it alive.

The AAP’s (American Academy of Pediatrics) supportive stance on “trans” kids and all the “gender affirming” treatments for even very young children isn’t based in science and certainly doesn’t follow the medical motto of “first do no harm.” The AAP is willing to promote the “correct” position (embracing trans “rights” even for 5 year olds) even if the science doesn’t support it (which it most definitely does not). But who knew? There’s another professional organization for pediatricians which isn’t completely converged. The American College of Pediatricians takes a decidedly different position. They recently released this press release:

Consenting to Sex Change Easier than Crossing Street
Recently the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published an excerpt, in their AAP Daily Briefing, from a study in the April Journal of Experimental Psychology. The study reported that children under the age of 14 are not cognitively capable of crossing a busy street “because children lack the perceptual judgment and physical skills needed to consistently get across safely.” This same AAP, however, also frequently promotes the claim that children this age or younger are cognitively capable of deciding that they are the wrong sex. Moreover, the AAP also deems children cognitively competent to consent to puberty blockers, toxic sex hormones and mutilating sex reassignment surgery.

Cognitive immaturity and impaired risk assessment during adolescence has always been recognized. That’s why society has long had age restrictions not only for consenting to medical procedures, but also for driving, voting, joining the military, and purchasing alcohol and cigarettes. Dr. Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians states,
“Children are not miniature adults. Everyone knows this. Our position statement, The Teenage Brain: Under Construction, documents the cognitive limitations of adolescents that compromise their ability to provide informed consent.”

While the AAP does not dispute any of this research, it appears to heed it only selectively. Apparently, cognitive immaturity is an obstacle to crossing the street but not for giving consent to a sex change. Looks like “correctness” outranks science when science gets in the way of agenda.

But it is most interesting that Mr. Dreher barely talks about the curriculum of public elementary and secondary schools. He emphasizes, instead, the peer culture of the school environment. Christian parents may try very hard, but everything can be undone by “the toxic peer culture” of public schools. In addition, the parents themselves may neither understand nor be capable of resisting. The effects are pervasive. Mr. Dreher quotes communications to him from parents of children in public schools who describe the startling number of public-school students who have come to believe that that they are transgender or bisexual. In the bluntest statement of his whole book, and one aimed directly at Christian parents, Mr. Dreher asserts that “two or three hours of religious education weekly is unlikely to counteract the forty or more hours spent in school or school-related programming.” The conclusion: Christian parents should remove their children from public schools.

A senior in a large public high school located in a major western city recently told this reviewer that he did not know any Christians at his school. Now, since there are obviously students there who are Christians, that means that the Christian students never identify themselves as Christians nor say or do anything identifiably Christian. Plainly, those students think that a public school is not an environment where it is appropriate or even permissible to be an open Christian. So, we may ask, if you never express who you really are, aren’t you inevitably changing who you really are?

***

In order to combine Christian education with an education in the liberal learning of Western civilization, Mr. Dreher endorses the classical Christian school movement and gives both Catholic and Evangelical examples. If such schools are too expensive or not available, the alternative is to homeschool.

I couldn’t agree more that the public schools in our country are a disaster and the best thing you could do for your kids is to keep them out. Here are a couple recent examples of the sort of negative influences in school he’s talking about.

Together with her attorneys, this brave ninth grader is asking for the right to express her faith, which is already guaranteed to her by the Constitution. Students should never have to check their beliefs at the school house door — or anywhere else for that matter.

Emily Zinos writes “A ‘transgender’ kindergartner registered at my kids’ school. That’s when the madness began.” She goes on to describe what happened in her school district: the school’s attempts at accommodation, the “trans” kid’s parents suing anyway, school sponsored meetings telling the rest of the parents they had to comply and when these parents funded a meeting to counterpoint the school’s presentation, “Well over a hundred local pro-LGBTQ protesters came to the presentation, prompting the local police to send a sergeant and two patrolling squads as protection.” Because tolerance, folks!

The rest of Ms. Zinos’ article is interesting, especially that a group of feminists has joined the fight against transgender activism because of common ground of ensuring the rights of biological women. Here is her conclusion about what’s happening in the schools:

institutionalizing gender ideology will require that schools ignore the evidence that it causes real harm to children. You can’t extol the virtues of gender ideology and question its soundness at the same time. By celebrating transgenderism as a valid identity, schools are promoting a body-mind disconnect that may very well bring on the gender dysphoric state they were attempting to prevent. And when the widely accepted “affirmative” medical treatments of gender dysphoria in children are both poorly studied and glaringly injurious, we have nothing to celebrate.

Make no mistake, schools that endorse and celebrate transgenderism as valid are endorsing child abuse.

Given examples like those (and those are only two, only the tip of the ice berg where trans-issues are but one problem among many), I’d say Dreher isn’t wrong about the state of education in America. He also opines that most of the American colleges may be beyond saving – unless they are replaced by truer places of secondary learning. What about his other ideas?

Mr. Dreher, who visited the Benedictine monastery at Nursia, Italy, in preparing his book, holds that the Rule is a “manual of practices, and its precepts simple and “plain enough to be adapted by lay Christians for their own use.” He derives eight main principles from the Rule and states why each would literally be a godsend for Christians in the modern, secular world. Against the disorder and loss of tradition of the modern world, the first principle is that it is order—ordered daily life, rather than today’s randomness—that sets the stage for “internal order.”

The second is prayer. “Prayer is the life of the soul,” Mr. Dreher quotes a Benedictine monk, and time must be set aside for it. The monastic emphasis on regular, daily prayer is the precisely needed antidote to the maniacal busyness of the contemporary world. Echoing the standard understanding of the role of prayer in Christian life, Mr. Dreher suggests that “if we spend all our time in activity, even when that activity serves Christ, and neglect prayer and contemplation, we put our faith in danger.”

Third, against the intellectualizing of everything today, Benedict’s Rule understands that the involvement of the body in manual labor is an essential part of human work. Again, Christians today, having been forced out of some of the professions, may have to resort to more labor by hand, Mr. Dreher concludes.

Fourth, contrary to the supreme modern principle of satisfying one’s own desires, “relearning asceticism—that is, how to suffer for the faith—is critical training for Christians living in the world today and the world of the near future.”

Fifth, even that most monastic principle of stability—that is, staying in one place—has some relevance to lay Christians, for what is the overall benefit of our constant mobility?

Sixth is community, the human architecture of a monastery, but also of a family, a neighborhood, a city, a society, and a polity. We readers might add to Mr. Dreher’s analysis the observation that we now increasingly live without a sense of shared life, without a “collective consciousness,” as Emile Durkheim put it. We are “free, equal, and independent,” but, pace John Locke, we are alone.

Seventh, contrary to Mr. Dreher’s critics and to a true understanding of the Rule, hospitality is a daily duty not only of monastic life but also of lay Christian life. Pilgrims and visitors are to “be received like Christ.” But hospitality, like all the virtues, must be practiced with prudence and according to the other principles of the Rule. A visitor cannot disturb or disrupt the community.

Mr. Dreher adds an eighth principle—balance, partly derived from the Benedictines but also from his own reflection and observation. By being too strict, some Christian communities have fallen apart or become “cultlike.” On the other hand, since abandonment to the will of God is the goal, Christian communities cannot be based on “spiritual mediocrity.”

This morning I was strolling a leisurely stroll on the treadmill and enjoying 45 minutes of toddler downtime (thanks, Brandy in kids club) when my eyes drifted to the newsfeed on the bottom of my tv screen where a “breaking news” alert was scrolling.

What constitutes breaking news in 2017? That’s a loaded question. But for this local ABC affiliate station, the answer was “Australia considering banning fairy tales from schools.” I rolled my eyes into my frontal lobe because probably it was offensive to real witches and living fairy godmothers, all that questionable detail Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, etc. go into about their lives and various motivations and ways of being.

But, no.

Apparently, it’s because fairy tales “encourage outdated gender norms” and that children “as young as four” are reportedly manifesting “gender biasing behaviors” in their play and make believe…

First of all, kids as young as four display “gender biasing behaviors” because children as young as age four do, in fact, have genders.

Fetuses, it turns out, also have genders… And gender – in parlance common up until just a few short years ago – was basically interchangeable with “sex” – and nobody was going to bat an eye or shred an admission form over it.

Children, like the rest of us, are male or female, and as such, they typically exhibit a few characteristic (but not exclusive) behaviors common to their gender. Boys, for example, as anyone who has ever birthed, raised, or even tangentially known one, are loud and they are intensely physical. Not all boys and not all the time, but overall, there is a certain exuberance that belongs to the male sex that is right and beautiful.

These boys will become men who lend their strong voices to the pursuit of truth and goodness. They will speak up for what is right, and they will take action to defy evil when they see it. Because that is what men are designed to do. Men are action-takers and pursuers of truth by nature. They image God in their strength, both physical and moral. And that is beautiful. (And does not, incidentally, exclude women from being action takers and pursuers of truth.)

***

We are foolish when we typecast certain “behaviors” into rigid gender norms and then insist that our children refrain at all cost from manifesting them, should they match up in a way we are currently collectively frowning upon.

What good is there to be gained by discouraging a boy from expressing strength and courage on the playground, whether he is shouting down a bully or rallying his friends to the winning kickball run? And what good is served in correcting a girl who longs to be told that she is beautiful – who in fact has a profound and fundamentally good desire to be affirmed in her beauty on a soul-deep level – that she ought not be concerned with something so trivial or vain?

Conversely, if a boy enjoys cooking and art and a girl is an absolute terror on the lacrosse field, these, too, are good and beautiful manifestations of their particular individual giftedness. This does not indicate a confused or wrongly-assigned gender, but normal and healthy diversity in this thing that we call being human.

Being a mother is intractably a female role; being a hairdresser is not.

While the world frets on about the sexism of fairy tales, about girls dreaming of true love and affirmed beauty, and boys about vanquishing dragons and journeying into uncharted territories, I’ll be sitting here reading Cinderella and the Chronicles of Narnia to all of them, male and female alike. And they will perhaps get different things from the same story. They will perhaps encounter it with their male or female minds and focus on particular aspects which attract or repel them, and that will be fine. That will be good.

Our differences are our strengths, and denying the intricate design of the complementarity between the sexes is to deface the image of the Creator Himself.